Free Cold Blood by James Fleming Page A

of your life and the lives of millions like you.”
    My strength was mighty. He hung from my hands like a strip of damp cloth. “ ‘Dan Doig, dead in the womb of his mother, who was born Elizaveta Rykov and is also now dead.’ Write that in your book of toadying. You and your sort... I hold you in absolute contempt.”
    His cheeks were bulging out, red and shining from the pressure of my grip. “So now you know not to ask about the Rykovs. When I die we are extinct. Extinct—is that plain enough? Done for. Shit in the pit.” So saying, I dropped him.
    He began to whimper about who’d pay for the tomb’s upkeep and so on. I said he could grind up our bones for fertiliser. Then I grabbed the oil lamp, made as if to cuff him when he tried to speak and went out into the night.
    Extinct! Not obsolete or out of fashion or temporarily extinguished like a candle but gone for eternity. The thick salty spunk that produces men of legend had got thinned out. It had been used too frivolously. The Rykovs were to blame, with their passion to be modern and European—lawn tennis, gardeners, all that consumed money. “A little fun”—that had been the cry among my uncles and aunts when I was growing up. They’dforgotten that sperm and character deteriorate together. You had only to look at my cousin Nicholas: a noble death but a disaster in all other respects. If you want to have successful children, you must get it right at the beginning. What comes out depends on what goes in. Humans forget that when it comes to insemination; they think that the rules apply only to farm animals.
    Or was it the fault of the Rykov ovaries? Too encrusted with the fatty consequences of the good life to get the full whack?
    However, had Elizaveta lived and carried Daniel to the full term, to the standard length of twenty inches, which could have been a trial for her narrow hips—
    I slipped the key into the great iron padlock of the mausoleum. The door grated on its hinges as I pushed it open.
    The smell of my family: cold, musty, like a larder that’s been empty for a long time. These people were dead in every conceivable sense. For there to be an afterlife, there had to be a God. And had God existed, there would have been some emanation of His presence: a blue pilot light burning above the door, for example. The odour would have been different. There would have been uplift of some nature.
    The coffins were neatly racked according to the various branches of the family. Uncle Igor had an ivory label that said simply: “
Count Igor Rykov, born 18 May 1842 and died 6 March 1917
.” He’d lived for seventy-five years. It was long enough.
    â€œCheerio,” I said. “Cheerio, all of you. Thank you for your gifts. Especially thank you, Papa. None of you thought such a day as this would arrive. You believed in monarchs, the Church and the values of a civilised world. Well, they’re all gone. Cheerio again.”
    I left the key at the foot of the door and scaled the palisade into the general cemetery. I found a piece of wasteland not yet cleared for graves. In the centre was a patch of wild lilac scrub. It was dry beneath them. I took out my pistol, wrapped my coat snugly round myself and lay down. It was good.
    It’s only Russians, with our melancholia, who actually gaze at the stars. Some nationalities are happy with a quick glance, others want nothing more than to classify them by size, brightness or their distance from the Earth. No one spends as muchtime in conversation with them as we do. This is because our stars are more brilliant than anyone else’s. In consequence, a feeling of intimacy can be acquired. They become our friends. As a matter of fact the stars are a vital part of the Orthodox religion and even the clergy acknowledge this.
    All our great novelists have found the night skies an irresistible subject. They call on their services whenever the hero is